To Quote a Phrase: Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks at 50

On this day in 1975, Dylan released his 15th studio album. It's the greatest love story ever captured on tape—songs as domestic and challenging as they are idyllic and dense, and songs that are as timeless as the protest music he stepped away from 10 years earlier.

To Quote a Phrase: Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks at 50
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At a Redbox outside a Giant Eagle in 2013, Mom let me pick out whatever movie I wanted. I chose Warm Bodies, because I liked zombie flicks—Romero’s cabinet of tricks, Zombieland, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise, you name it. I don’t remember many details about the movie, but I do remember the “Shelter From the Storm” needle-drop. I want to be cool and say that I knew and loved Bob Dylan’s music prior to that, but I don’t think I did—not beyond the cultural template laid out before me and everyone else, in the films and TV I’d entered and exited. I definitely watched Bob sign a copy of Self Portrait for Chumlee on Pawn Stars in 2010, and Tumblr quickly drove me towards Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. And it was there that I met “Queen Jane Approximately” for the first time. And thanks to Richard Linklater, I knew “Hurricane.” The Big Lebowski turned me and a million others on to “The Man in Me.” My favorite movie when I was 14, Silver Linings Playbook, had “Girl From the North Country” in it. Friends played “Sign on the Window” during the season eight finale episode.

All of it was there, silently warping me into the kind of listener that would, in the middle of watching The Royal Tenenbaums for the first time in college, annoyingly tell the entire room, “That’s ‘Wigwam’ by Bob Dylan,” upon hearing the first “la-da-da-da-da-di.” My infatuation with Dylan spread. During a Target trip, I convinced Mom to buy me this very soft cotton shirt with a picture of Bobby on the front and DYLAN in big, white block letters above him. The FYE at my local mall always kept used Dylan CDs well-stocked, and I’ve still got my clearance copy of Highway 61 Revisited with a big gash across the front of the jewel case somewhere around here. There’s a notebook someplace, at the bottom of a landfill, that’s stuffed front-to-back with handwritten lyrics in two different fonts.

Steven and I would spend class periods challenging each other on how many lines we could remember, taking turns writing them down on empty wide-ruled pages until the dismissal bell came around. And in our computer classes, when we weren’t making videos that ripped off Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, we’d take Sporcle quizzes trying to name every Dylan album in order. He and I took an after-school trip to the record store three towns over to pick up copies of Shadows in the Night on release day. And we listened to those songs on the drive home. And I’m still not so sure “Melancholy Mood” ever made sense for going 75 MPH on a two-lane highway.

Caught someplace between phases of unmedicated OCD and ADHD, I became a student of needless facts. In eighth grade, I spent more than 50 days in in-school suspension, and I’d read a sports almanac from cover-to-cover all day. Discovering Bob Dylan’s music was like stumbling into a wellspring of never-ending material: demo tapes, outtakes, live recordings, one-off singles. I plundered samplers of the Bootleg Series online and read every Wikipedia page I could click on. I may have failed Algebra II, but my vocabulary has a pocket just for Dylan’s music and poetry. During one lunch period, Steven talked my ear off about Vol. 5 of the Bootleg Series, the third installment and a 102-minute document of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. During study hall, he played me audio clips from shows in Boston, Cambridge and Montreal, audio clips that became five of my favorite live performances ever: “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Isis” and “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below).”

The Rolling Thunder Revue was an epic rebirth for Bob Dylan, who’d ditched his longtime collaborators, the Band, for a new group of players—including vocalist Ronee Blakley, guitarists T Bone Burnett, Roger McGuinn, Bob Neuwirth, Mick Ronson and Steven Soles, violinist Scarlet Rivera, string wizard David Mansfield, percussionist Luther Rix, drummer Howie Wyeth and bassist Rob Stoner. And of course, Joan Baez was there, too, playing guitar and singing and even playing a little percussion of a few tunes. Allen Ginsberg tagged along, joining Dylan at Jack Kerouac’s grave on their Lowell stop. Patti Smith and Muhammad Ali were on the guest list, and Joni Mitchell joined the band for the end of the tour’s inaugural leg. Dylan even brought Sam Shepard along to write the screenplay for the tour’s movie that Howard Alk was filming. In Martin Scorsese’s Netflix documentary on the tour, Dylan gestures to one of my very favorite quotes from him: “[The Rolling Thunder Revue] happened so long ago, I wasn’t even born.”

That point in Dylan’s career was marked by pageantry, by the Americanism of traveling theatrics. He wanted to “play for the people” and perform in small auditoriums, gymnasiums and theaters in out-of-the-way places. The tour began in Plymouth, where the Pilgrims were, and felt closer to Dylan’s campus auditorium-playing, folk-singing days than any of his previous full-band excursions. Considering the era of cultural megastardom, virality and accessibility that we’re currently in, the idea that the most famous songwriter alive could do an ordinary thing like play intimate, low-cap shows feels like a miracle even in today’s context. Sure, you could argue that, by the time 1975 arrived, Dylan had already fallen from music’s summit of relevance (even though Planet Waves did reach #1 on the Billboard 200 the previous January), thanks to his most commercial records preceding the zeitgeist’s most important period (1967-1970, roughly), but the needle still always hovered over his business. Before Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and Dylan peaked at #16 and #17 on the albums chart, respectively, he had enjoyed a streak of seven consecutive Top 10 releases, dating back to Bringing It All Back Home.

Dylan named the revue after a thunderstorm, but “Rolling Thunder” was also the name of an American bombing campaign in Vietnam between 1965 and 1968—a war that ended just months before Dylan and his bandmates, whom he dubbed “Guam,” first arrived in Plymouth. He covered his face in white paint and donned plastic masks; stages were crowded but intimate, if there even were stages. Sometimes, it felt like Dylan and Guam landed in the company of some college-kid enclave in a non-major-market town. He turned it all into a carnival, transforming some of his folky tunes into seam-splitting anthems. I think a lot about his performance of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” from that tour, how you can so perfectly hear Ronee’s voice singing behind Bob’s, how Scarlet’s violin spoils with such conviction that it sounds like a walloping and weeping fiddle.

The Rolling Thunder Revue quickly walked out of the 1974 tour’s shadow. Those dates with the Band were Bob Dylan’s first real string of shows in eight years, not since his motorcycle crash in upstate New York in July 1966. Levon Helm said that the 1974 tour “wasn’t a very passionate trip for any of us.” The Band can’t help but sound pretty sweet on those songs, even if Richard Manuel’s alcoholism was worsening and Robbie Robertson’s writer’s block had boosted interpersonal dysfunction—even if a lot of Before the Flood feels massive, faraway and illegible.

The revue, as it was, became a proverbial second life for Dylan, as he and Guam were making the kind of music that could stir up the dead. 10 months before the tour began, Blood on the Tracks went to #1 despite receiving mixed reviews. Writing for Rolling Stone, Jon Landau panned the record and said it had “been made with typical shoddiness.” NME called the arrangements “so trashy they sound like mere practice takes.” Crawdaddy’s Jim Cusimano found the instrumentation “incompetent.” Robert Christgau saw it as Dylan’s “most mature and assured record,” while Michael Gray argued for Blood on the Tracks being the project that detaches him from the cultural mythos that had plagued him for a decade. And, of course, retrospect has paid its dividends here, as Blood on the Tracks is widely considered to be one of the greatest albums ever made, landing at #30 on Paste’s list last June. These songs are so impossibly venerational that, seven years ago, Luca Guadagnino was going to make them into a movie.

Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks in September and December 1974, across about eight total days of studio time, doing sessions at A & R in New York City and Sound 80 in Minneapolis. After putting Dylan out with Columbia a year earlier, he made two records back-to-back—Planet Waves and Before the Flood—with Asylum. Estranged from his wife Sara Lownds, he returned to the mothership for Blood on the Tracks, struck up a relationship with a Columbia employee named Ellen Bernstein and began attending painting classes taught by Norman Raeben, who’d be dead within four years but managed to teach Dylan “how to see… in a way that allowed [him] to do consciously what [he] unconsciously felt.” Bob has long credited Norman with unlocking within him the subconscious material that would turn into Blood on the Tracks—a “code” made present and songs existing with “no sense of time.” So, when his tour with the Band concluded, he retreated to his farm in Minnesota, with Bernstein in tow, and wrote 17 brand new songs.

At some point, Dylan considered doing Blood on the Tracks in the style of Highway 61 Revisited, with Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar. The former bandmates met and Dylan played through all of his new material for Bloomfield. But the picker couldn’t learn the songs quick enough, and he later said that all of them were long and in the same key. “It was one of the strangest experiences in my life,” Bloomfield later said. “He was sort of pissed off that I didn’t pick it up.” So Dylan stripped Blood on the Tracks for parts, performing bare-boned acoustic arrangements in the same room at A & R Studios, where he’d made six records a decade prior. He played the songs like a medley, adding choruses and ripping verses apart. He brought the band Deliverance in for accompaniment but dismissed them after two days because they couldn’t match his pace. He’d hang onto bassist Tony Brown and call up organist Paul Griffin and steel-pedaler Buddy Cage and, after 10 days, finished Blood on the Tracks.

Well, sort of. The story goes that Dylan played his brother, David Zimmerman, a test pressing of Blood on the Tracks and got some constructive feedback. David said the record was too bare to sell. Christgau heard the album early and hated it, too, calling it “a sellout to the memory of Dylan’s pre-electric period.” David asked Bob if he would re-record half of the songs at Sound 80 in Minneapolis with a new backing band, and he did. David recruited Chris Weber, Peter Ostroushko, Gregg Inhofer, Billy Peterson and Bill Berg to re-work “Tangled Up in Blue,” “You’re a Big Girl Now,” “Idiot Wind,” “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” and “If You See Her, Say Hello” into brighter ornaments after Christmas 1974, and the newly constructed LP was on record store shelves 30 days later.

Most days, I prefer the Bootleg Series version of Blood on the Tracks (aptly titled “More Blood, More Tracks”) over the real thing. It’s a good composite of what the record Dylan played for David may have sounded like, and I think the second take of “You’re a Big Girl Now” is among Dylan’s all-time finest recordings, and “Up to Me” is one of his strongest compositions ever lost to the cutting-room-floor (and it contains one of my favorite misheard lyrics, “I would’ve followed you in the dark, but I didn’t have a ticket stub”). Take 3A of “Simple Twist of Fate” is a slow jam in the legion of Dylan’s post-Time Out of Mind years, and the fifth take of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” could make a shitkicker weep. And then there is “Tangled Up in Blue,” a song that has remained, sporadically, in Dylan’s setlists and has gained new verses over the years. I catalog the remade third take, which sounds like it was recorded at a kitchen table, with the Real Live version from 1984, which sounds like a different song entirely.

The second take of “You’re a Big Girl Now” is a special gesture, though. Once stashed in-between “Simple Twist of Fate” and “Idiot Wind,” it flourishes on More Blood, More Tracks. Dylan’s voice is closer to us here, his acoustic guitar nothing more than an afterthought. His singing cracks, warbles, strains and thins out. Listening to him labor through the ache of lines like “I’m going out of my mind, ooh, with a pain that stops and starts, ooh, like a corkscrew to my heart… ever since we’ve been apart” gives Blood on the Tracks a new color. In the performance, Dylan puts an emphasis on the “I can make it through, you can make it, too” couplet, and that is, to me, the tenor of the album. I still marvel at how “You’re a Big Girl Now” softens the close-to-the-chest, brutality of specifics that make “Idiot Wind” so potently coarse—how it extols the empty trysts and sins of “being born too late” that mark “Simple Twist of Fate.”

When you’re first integrating yourself within the context of Dylan’s work, you are presented with Blood on the Tracks via his son Jakob’s understanding of it, that the songs are his “parents talking.” And, when I was 17 years old, I liked the idea of that, even if, at every turn, Bob denied that the album is autobiographical (he would, later on, concede that “Simple Twist of Fate” “happened to him”). Dylan is such a tempest of mysticism that the humanness of Blood on the Tracks seems less faraway than most of his catalog. Many have cited the album as one of the greatest breakup records ever finished. I suppose I thought that, too, when I first listened to “Idiot Wind” and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” because it’s good music for the broken-hearted, a token for those of us already alone or those of us who soon will be.

Considering the albums released during my lifetime and which ones are the closest kin of Blood on the Tracks, Beck’s Sea Change comes to mind—in substance and in color palette, as those muddy blues and purples collide like bruises woven into a tapestry. David Fricke said that Sea Change was an “album of spectacular suffering”; “You gotta drive all night just to feel like you’re okay,” however, bears hope if only because it tells you how to find it, like a wilted Dylan singing, “If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born” in-between the vibrations of strings tuned to open E. And to that I say, Blood on the Tracks isn’t just for the unlucky—borne from these songs are true freaks, romantics and storytellers. It’s a record that is as domestic and challenging as it is dense and idyllic, the greatest love story ever captured on tape.

The 1970s exist in halves for Dylan. From 1970 until 1974, he put out some of his most maligned work, namely the misjudged Self Portrait and the catastrophically rough collection of cover songs called Dylan (though I do adore his take on Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles”). In there, too, was the very beautiful New Morning and the odds-and-sods serviceability of Planet Waves. And he cut that live record, Before the Flood, with the Band and wrote the soundtrack for Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, which generated one of his most beloved compositions, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” But the second part of the decade, beginning with Desire and stretching into Street-Legal and Slow Train Coming, signaled a second act for Dylan, for better (“Changing of the Guards”) or, certainly, for worse (all of Saved). Blood on the Tracks lingers somewhere in the middle, the elder sibling to the meta-textual, line-blurring collage of politicking, Mexican daydreaming and reconciliation that the black sheep Desire muscled into the folk music lexicon.

So to better know Blood on the Tracks, I go back to Dylan’s debut record. It’s suitably titled Bob Dylan, and is made up of about 85% cover songs. He arranged traditional songs, like “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “Gospel Plow” in one breath while tackling the work of Jesse Fuller, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bukka White the next. Of course, he wrote “Song to Woody” and “Talkin’ New York,” too, but, ironically, Bob Dylan never really sounded like the man the record was named after. Folk singers covered folk standards back then because those songs stood the test of time, providing power and liberation no matter who sang the words. I imagine it was dramatic when Dylan turned around and wrote The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and put some originals of his own into the Great American Songbook. And I do often wonder how many people heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the first time and could already sense a shift or an awakening coming.

But Dylan was never supposed to be a protest singer, I don’t think. At least not for more than an album or two. He got better on every record—curter, meaner, uglier; he embraced the asshole idioms raging within himself, the kind you summon when you’re writing something like “Idiot Wind. The milquetoast catch-all of “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind” soon became the blunt, “But who you philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears, take the rag away from your face, now ain’t the time for your tears” by 1964, and then he embraced the gravitas of Manhattan streets “infested with whore houses, sleazy bars and porno supermarkets totally beyond renovation or redemption” by the end of 1965. He went from sitting in the company of Pete Seeger, Dave van Ronk and Phil Ochs as the second-coming of Woody to being a disinterested prophet candy-striping the runoff of the Beat Generation with anti-escapist, cowboy songs in debt to the gospels of Robin Hood, T.S. Eliot and Cain and Abel.

Dylan managed to appease his faithful followers until the end of 1964 by dueting with Baez often and puffing proverbs into his diatonically-tuned harmonica, remaining his generation’s true-bue mouthpiece. But when Dylan “went electric” at Newport in 1965, the community pushed back against it. In James Mangold’s (unreliable and oft-factually incorrect) A Complete Unknown, the crowd heckles Bob and throws garbage at him while Seeger flips out about the volume and fist-fights break out all around. It feels operatic and melodramatic, like some great, choreographed dissent. It’s a little too wrought with movie magic: Bob, in an effort to make things right, singing “Mr. Tambourine Man” to pitchfork-wielding harlequins who think Greenwich Village is burning. But maybe that crowd deserved to be villainized and infantilized for being such jeering cranks who treated the Dylan fiasco like some apocalyptic fortune had been cast upon them.

I don’t think a Manc called Dylan “Judas” because he picked up an electric guitar. No, I think he called Dylan Judas because Dylan stopped writing songs for the common man to sing. And I think, maybe when he was making Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, that felt especially true to many. They wanted songs they could live in forever—songs always in fashion but never out of style, songs that anyone can make their own. They wanted “Blowin’ in the Wind” and they wanted everyone to sing it, so Joan Baez, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder and Marlene Dietrich all did.

But when Dylan started going to Raeben’s classes in 1974, he wanted more, too. He wanted arcs of life projected like games of chance into 16-verse epics. He wanted to eulogize fleeting love affairs over simple arrangements and patronize his way into transcendence through a self-flagellation that rock history has deemed a great illustration of hurt and yearning. Dylan wanted “yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room” and, to me, that sounds like a pretty good folk song. And, in some elaborate, roundabout way, Dylan did keep writing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” over and over, long after 1963 was over. And, like the tune that made Bob Dylan his generation’s keeper, Blood on the Tracks is a language unto itself, capacities of hurt legible in all lifetimes even when it’s only sung by one voice.

In his memoir, Dylan wrote that Blood on the Tracks was inspired by short stories written by Anton Chekhov, a man who said so many Dylan-esque things during his lifetime that I wouldn’t dare argue against Bob’s word. “There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions,” Chekhov once wrote in a letter. “Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked.” The songs on Blood on the Tracks depart into life’s most fascinating challenges, into estrangement and reunion. I hear Dylan shout, “It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe,” and begin to consider the arguments that may have ruptured through my own household when I left for college, what Mom and Dad said to each other before briefly separating into their own spectacular suffering. Because, as I’ve grown older, and as I’ve come and gone from relationships of my own, both longterm and short, I’ve started figuring out the secret to Jakob’s words, that Blood on the Tracks isn’t just his parents talking, but it’s also my parents talking. And it’s you talking, and it’s me talking.

But then, in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” Dylan mentions Ashtabula, a town 45 minutes north of where I grew up and still live, and I am reminded of when, at Steven’s graduation party, we slept outside, under the cover of a backyard gazebo while all of our friends slept in their cars. And, when his parents quit arguing, he kept me awake by finger-picking the same “My Back Pages” melody that earned him first place at our school’s talent show. Steven and I, we spoke a certain language with each other when we still knew each other. Our intimacy was hidden in Dylanspeak, in debating Bob’s discography and taking a summer trip to New York so we could stand on Jones Street where Dylan stood. In my short life, I am lucky to have been beholden to a love so deep and distant it eventually became a parody.

I’m not sure of the year, but we went to a bookstore to buy a copy of Tarantula when we didn’t have any money, so we stashed the book underneath one of the shelves and, to this day, I still wonder if Steven ever went back to get it. I never asked, but I get my answer when I hear Bob Dylan sing, “But I’ll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass, in the ones I love” just minutes after declaring that “it was gravity which pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart.” Blood on the Tracks is an album about idiots like us, about people who wear masks just so they can tell the truth. It’s a cruel, glib and splendid album, too, punished so deeply within itself that its protagonists want to kill each other but crumble at the thought of loving anyone else.

Read: “Bob Dylan’s 62 Greatest Songs, Ranked”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

 
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